In the space of about two minutes on Sunday night, Canada’s freestyle skiing squad experienced the full range of Olympic emotion: unbridled joy swinging to crushing heartbreak.

When Australia’s Britteny Cox, skiing in the penultimate spot of the women’s moguls final, was given a fifth-place score, it locked Canada’s Justine Dufour-Lapointe, who had delivered a solid run just moments earlier, into a podium position.

Up in the starting gate at Phoenix Snow Park, staring down the steep course and amid heavy snow, there was just one skier left. Andi Naude, the 22-year-old from Penticton, B.C., just needed a run that matched what she done a half-hour earlier, and she would have an Olympic medal of her own.

Naude soared through a difficult first jump — a full backflip with a twist — but picked up a lot of speed when she landed. She couldn’t quite regain her line and all of a sudden her skis were sideways and she was off the course, holding her palms up: did that just happen?

Naude’s blown final run meant Dufour-Lapointe, 23, of Montreal, won the silver medal with a score of 78.56 points. France’s Perrine Laffont edged her for gold by less than a tenth of a point at 78.65, and Yulia Galysheva of Kazakhstan took bronze at 77.40.

Afterward, the teammates were a striking contrast. Dufour-Lapointe was all smiles, having backed up her gold medal in the same event in Sochi with another medal here, this one in a year in which she and her sisters, Chloe and Maxime, have struggled to find their world-class form and in which their mother has battled cancer.

Naude was bravely talking about keeping her head held high, but as much as she tried to focus on the positives, she couldn’t quite keep it together. She held back tears until she couldn’t hold them back any longer.

“Up there, I was really just trying to focus on what I love to do, and that’s to ski. And to be at the top, going down last at the Olympic Games, that’s really special.” Here, her voice broke. “So, I’m psyched, but, sorry, I’m a little emotional.” Naude stopped for a few seconds to gather herself. “I’m happy with how it ended, but not thrilled, that’s for sure.”

Naude said that she had no regrets about trying the big trick on the first jump, even on a cold, snowy night on a tough course where many of the top skiers struggled.

“I was one of the very few women throwing it out here today,” she said of the back-full. “I wouldn’t want it any other way. There’s obviously more risk throwing the harder tricks, but, I mean, things happen.”

For Dufour-Lapointe, who watched as her sister Chloe failed to advance out of the first run of the finals and then skied one of the best runs of the day to ensure that she would go through, it was a night of many emotions.

“I’m feeling so proud of myself right now, I know I did everything I could today,” she said. “I crossed that finish line knowing that whatever happened next, I put down the best run I could handle.”

Dufour-Lapointe said that the silver was as sweet as the Sochi gold, especially after the struggles this year and with both of her parents present and healthy. Her family is everything to her, she said. “It’s the only thing that counts, actually, at the end of the day if you don’t have anybody to hug.”

She said this medal, though a lesser hue, meant a lot more than the first one. “So much more hard work,” she said, and more adversity. “When I was up there, I was just thinking, this is my last run, I want to control it.” And then she did.

Dufour-Lapointe, standing at the bottom of the course to watch Naude attempt her final run, gave her teammate a long hug after her Olympic dream died halfway down the mountain.

“I know that girl, she works so hard,” Dufour-Lapointe said. “I would have loved to give her a thousand hugs and a thousand kisses, but she has to live it herself.”

“I just told her that I was proud of her and she needs to be also proud of herself. Doing that big back-full up there, on that challenging course? Oh, dear. You don’t get it, guys, but this course was hard.”

That much was evident. American Jaelin Kauf, the top-ranked skier on the World Cup moguls circuit this season, didn’t even make it into the medal runs.

Naude, with the chance to grab a medal right there in front of her, instead was left grabbing for answers. She didn’t think she tried to do too much, she said.

“I was just trying to go out there and ski,” she said, the tears on her red cheeks mixed with the falling snow. “I mean, things happen. That’s obviously not what I wanted. But, yeah.”